The whole anaolgy fails miserably. The "builder" is a small bussiness, the coder is an employee. The builder's employee who fucked up the wall does not pay for it out of his own money/time, for the same reason his wages don't double when company profit does. An employee is not a one man company, nor should it be, any employer who tells you otherwise is trying to screw you.
Then again there are those folks that insist on being treated as "contractors" instead of employees so they can set their own hours, moonlight for multiple companies, and deduct expenses. Perhaps those one-man/woman companies can deduct the cost of fixing their bugs on their own time?
There doesn't appear to be any reasonable way to evaluate a students education. My philosophy is simply this: It's up to the student to get everything they want from their education (knowledge, grades, contacts, study habits, practice w/ sleep deprivation, friends). An education is not given and graded, it is taken and exploited....
In reality, there is only one basic needs in the professor-student relationship to assign a grade or a student to get a grade.
1. Assigning a cost to enrollment into the course (basically to deter folks that aren't interested/qualified in occupying space).
However, the school and the student have a different relationship that is facilitated by grades.
1. By advertising their grades to potential employers or other schools, students can increase their perceived value to such institutions. 2. By assigning grades to students, schools can manage their reputation relative to other institutions (nominally poor students can be "discounted" or grades can be "inflated" to increase the perceived value of all students).
In a way grades are like currency that can be inflated/controlled by the institution to manage their economy. This might suggest that there is some alternate currency-substitute (analogous to bit-coin) that has the property that it can't be inflated (devalued). Something like knowledge?
Although this might seem attractive to have some decentralized authority broker the evaluation of students based on what knowledge they were able to mine from the education process, it has the downside for the schools, w/o the ability to deflate when needed, this increase the likelihood a "greek-like" liquidity crisis (employers won't accept credentials and new students won't enroll). Needless to say, they would fight this tooth and nail...
The evaluation of students by decentralized authority has similar problems of bitcoin. W/o a centralized authority, there is continuing instability, there is a risk of collusion taking over the evaluation or an alternate measure becoming more popular and upending the scheme.
Since it's hard to see the value of grades as an independent entity, why bother trying so hard to figure it out. Just like money, it is not the end goal in life.
Seems like Tesla is attempting to follow Mercedes...
S-class - top of the line expensive (100K) X-class - baby SUV (to come out real soon now) E-class - something for people that envy those that own a S-class but don't have enough money C-class - crap that ruins the company's reputation
I wonder when Tesla will announce the C-class... Mercedes seem to think there will be success with an A-class below the C-class, we'll see how many people they can get to part with their money for that badge...
How do you know? Because AFAIK, nobody really has any idea when Jesus was born. Best guess based on biblical accounts is between 6BC and 4BC, but they really don't have any idea what time of year it was based on biblical accounts...
The rationale for Dec 25 historically has been a guesstimate of conception around Spring Equinox (estimated at March 25 by early scholars, but now known to be inaccurate) + 9 months. There is also some anecdotal evidence of a birth date in early January (around Jan 6), but most of these account are from long after Jesus' death and may be confused with a baptismal celebratory date...
Likewise Newton's birthdate is often given as Christmas, but that is a Julian calendar date (in Gregorian calendar, he was born on Jan 4th). Although the Julian calendar was in use in 6BC, it wasn't widely used outside of Europe.
Odds are they were probably born on calendar days that were close to each other relative to the Gregorian Calendar, but nobody really knows...
Creationism boils down to "if God created the world, then it would look exactly like it does now, and as evidence for this, we have folklore and the observation that the world looks exactly as we see it".
I suggest we do away with the anthropic principle as well while we are at it (I always hated that one as it always had that same smell).
Apple managed to survive without ever shipping a Mac running Windows...
Yet they did switch to shipping Macs that could run Windows (boot camp, parallels).
In fact it wasn't just that Macs could run windows, the Apple folks that speced the HW for the Macs were always interested in how well the windows benchmarks performed on all the Mac HW they shipped because inevitably someone would use this as a basis to compare the value proposition of the machines and they knew many folks bought Macs because they could still get PC compatibility if necessary for their job/work.
Right now the world is on Apple's side, but when it hasn't they haven't been historically too proud to make their products useful if necessary (e.g., office on Mac, etc)... Of course the Apple fanbois don't tend to see things that way...
Running a hot android app under iOS might actually be a desired thing someday, you never know..
As I understand it, EBR-II was a breeder, but during its breeding lifetime was intially fueled by U-235 fuel rods, and created Plutonium from U-238 fertile material and was later fueled by reprocessed Plutonium from the breeding (and some decommissioned soviet warheads), and did not ever employ the U-233 from fertile Thorium-232 technique.
Still impressive that a cop acutally knows the law...
Knowledge is a strange thing. Although many people tend to associate knowledge it with schooling or intelligence, however, knowledge is really just something simply acquired mostly by relavent experience.
My guess is someone in the department was tasked to develop some sort of FAQ or memo to help train cops doing speed traps. This person figured out all the thing things they wanted to give out tickets for and looked up the relavent law and made it part of the speed-trap training memo/FAQ given out to officers assigned to speed trap duty.
Call it the chinese room, tricks of the trade or standing on the shoulders of giants or whatever... In computer science, they often call similar optimizationsmemoization.
Thorium salt reactors are still "up-and-coming" techniques. Although there have been a small smattering of experiments over time, the only significant testing of the idea was back in the '60s (the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge Nation Labs). Although most of the technical hurdles appear to be known, I don't think there is doubt that more work needs to be done to make this production worthy. Some of the biggest issues (e.g, metalugical radiation brittling and salt reprocessing efficiency), are hard to do small scale experiments with so the only real course is to build more experimental reactors to help understand this. Experiments like this are really expensive. The FUJI project (one recent attempt considered to be a leading effort) failed to raise $300M required to build their experimental miniFUJI reactor back in 2011.
There are also secondary effects that are unknown. Uranium mining of past decades created some pretty bad ecological damage and it is unclear that Thorium minining would be any better (or be similarly econonmical with lower impact mining techniques). There is also the issue with decommissioning (even with existing Light-water reactors, this is an ongoing cost concern). At Thorium Salt Reactor have greater fuel efficiency...
One of the continuous knocks against Thorium Salt Reactors has also been nuclear proliferation security issues with reprocessing (since the most efficient configuration for Thorium Salt Reactors is a breeder configuration), but although there are some known safeguards available for denaturing to make bomb-capable material difficult to extract, terrorist level dirty-bomb material is always available in large quantities (a different threat model than in the 60's)...
So, what am I missing? Does India have lots of factories making photovoltaic cells or something?
Why not Solar Thermal? As I understand it...
1. Lack of local companies that make solar thermal equipment (aka CSP or concentrated solar power). 2. Lack of experience with large deployment unlike PV like 50:1 in MW to date (no experience means no reference projects to predict ROI for contracting companies or investment banks) 3. Lack of water resources for cooling (most simple solar thermal needs reliable-access to cooling water to avoid equipment malfunction).
Of course India could deploy a minimal water solar thermal solution (e.g., air cooled or maybe Heller towers), but they have even less experience with that and most government funded programs require a minimum make-local percentage.
I am not an accountant, but, you can probably get away with (not pay penalties) having zero deductions until just before the end of the year, as long as you have a year's worth of taxes deducted from your last few paychecks (however many it takes).
Is this legal, or even a good plan? I have idea!
You absolutely have no idea. 1. Employers must report withholding at least quarterly (or monthly if they are large reporters). These amounts are subject reviewed by the IRS If the IRS notices you are claiming incorrect deductions they will request your W4 from your employer and will likely send you and your employer a "lock-in" letter that will set your deductions (basically legally require your employer to override your W4) if they feel you aren't paying enough as you go. There are also significant penalties and backup withholding requirements for filing false information on your W4. 2. Quarterly estimated payments must be made in 4 equal amounts to avoid penalties unless you can show that your income was equivalently uneven during the year. 3. Do not attempt to cheat the IRS, you aren't any more clever than the wackos that they have previously caught.
If you feel you need an analogy, this monopole construction technique is more akin to constructing a meta-material (e.g., something with a negative index of refraction). It is a simulation of something that doesn't normally exist in nature, but by carefully controlling the small scale structure, you can get it to have certain properties you want in a limited range of operation.
I was specifically rejecting your analogy of monopoles like holes, because that is analogous to using the absence an electron in an environment to simulate an anti-electron, where there are not positive or negative magnetic charges used in this technique (because magnetic charges likely don't exist).
One technique is trying to make a spirit level by filling a tube almost to the top with water and using the bubble as "hole" (the lack of liquid) to exhibit the effect of gravity. Another technique is simulating a level by using the gyroscopes in your cell phone. If there is no liquid available, you cannot execute the first plan, but of course you can still simulate it using other phenomena. In the case of your cell phone, a Micro-Electro-Mechanical (MEMs) gyroscope is used, no liquid needed.
Although you may like the "electron hole" analogy, it does not correctly illustrate this phenomena.
A "electron hole" is a deficit of negative charge in some region relative to another that can be sometimes treated quantum mechanically as if it was a positive charge. This phenomena has nothing to do with this as there are no regions of opposite magnetic charge to borrow from.
This effect described relies on manipulating the magnetic fields in such a way that it organizes a condensed matter state in a way similar to a Dirac-monopole (basically a monopole-like structure, except it has a 1D dirac-string hanging off connected to something that has the net opposite "charge" as opposed to a fundamental monopole which if it existed would be a particle with an actual unit of magnetic charge like an electron has a unit of electrical charge). The interesting thing is that it is a simulation of a dirac monopole in a quantum regime such that it follows the same quantum law of physics as a Dirac monopole.
Of course they couldn't do this in free space (which is how a real dirac monopole could be manifested), but in the context of this experimental environment, it bears the question that if you manipulate the magnetic fields such that it looks like monopole, is it really a monopole you created? Does the field create the particle, or the particle create the field? That's a question to think about. If it quacks like a duck...
As I understand it, there are 2 potential manifestations for what people call magnetic monopoles...
1. Existence of a unit of magnetic charge analogous to an electrical charge attached to some sort of particle. 2. So-called Dirac monopoles (a "monopole" that is connected by a 1-D dirac-string to another "monopole" of opposite magnetic "charge")
Nobody has seen #1, and from what I can gather, most folks don't expect to find them. #2 turns out to be one theoretical way to get monopoles to be consistent w/ Maxwell's equations w/o the existence of magnetic charges. The main theoretical difference between the two might be thought of as the #1 has divergence is all directions, but #2 has divergence in all directions, but one (where the "string" comes out), but this may be unobservable since the Dirac string is 1D.
This experiment in question appears to be a way to simulate the physics of case #2 inside of a condensed matter system. The point isn't "magnetic" in the common sense of the word, only simulating the physics in the confines of that system. One of the breakthroughs appears to be the fact that they could somehow image the (vortex) pattern of the field rather than indirectly inferring the field from it's properties.
The general often claimed that he never realized any profit from his work. But in his last years he urged interviewers not to portray him as poor, noting that he had a sizable apartment, a good car and a comfortable dacha on a lake near the factory where he had worked for decades.
Work and loyalty to country, he often suggested, were their own rewards. “I am told sometimes, ‘If you had lived in the West you would have been a multimillionaire long ago,’ ” he said. “There are other values.”
Anyway, if there are any other people who have contributed so much but been recognized so little, I'd love to know about them.
FWIW, there are plenty of practically unknown contributors to the world. Here are a few...
Frank Willis (the security guard that first called the police in some office complex called somekindofliquid-GATE) Thomas Midgley, Jr (first invented Tetra-Ethyl-Lead and later Freon, probably the man with the most impact on the environment) Vasili Arkhipov (commander of the K-19 sub AND later the officer that decided to NOT start WWIII during the Cuban missile crisis) And all the women who had their contributions minimized back in the day when it wasn't proper to recognize their contributions.
Originally, most phosphate production came from guano (basically petrified seabird poop). It was so strategically valuable, that the USA was allowing people to annex islands and exercise mining rights with US military backing. The country of Nauru (aka Pleasant Island) once based their entire economy on it.
Of course, as with most things, we literally ate it all up (it's used to make fertilizer for plants) and now we rely on other sources. Then of course there are people that argue we have reached peak phosphorus production of all possible sources...
What resource shall we queue up next in our sky-is-falling headline of-the-week?
Frankly, plastics don't have the valuable electrical properties that we need for truly innovative design.
I think you need to think outside the box a bit. It doesn't have to be metal (although metal has some useful properties other than electrical)... Some plastics can be conductive, and certain conductive materials can be embedded into plastics and integrated into the 3d printing process...
Here's an example of using electro-conductive carbon black in the 3d printing process...
By analogy, it's the same as me petitioning the court to rule that I never stole anything from you. The court agrees, saying that unless you figure out the puzzle and guess what I stole and when, I'll be deemed innocent and you can't come after me later when you realize that your gold watch is missing.
No. By analogy, it's the same as you agreeing to pay someone $50/per person to stay in a hotel room and paying them $200 for the 4 people in your party. Then a 7 more friends later crash your party. The owner of the hotel now wants $350 more dollar from you based on the original agreement of $50/person and you sue the owner asking for a declatory judgment that you only owe the $200 you already paid because the hotel accepted the original payment and it's up to the owner to prove that those 7 extra people actually stayed in the hotel room.
Sure the owner of the hotel should have come up with a better agreement that addressed a better accounting method to make sure that people that come later to a party were accounted for (e.g., station someone at the door and count people going in and out) and how they would be charged and who should have to pay for that accounting method, but this really has less with patents, but more with the vagaries of contract law when the agreed contract language does not explicitly cover damages and allocation of overhead.
When I went to university many moons ago, I studied Analog VLSI and power electronics. Upon graduation, I discovered that for most companies, they wanted someone to essentially apprentice for about 6 years before they would let you touch a circuit (they had senior engineers to do the "real" work). Taking a job on the computer engineering side of the fence was ticket to being able to do real work (and paid better too boot) and I was lured over to the "d" side...
Too bad I stopped looking at that stuff back in the D-class amplifier days. Now they have all sorts of fun G and H-class power amplifiers to design. Sigh;^)
You might not be able to tell if something IS a fake if it is of something that was mass produced (like a limited print of a famous work), but there is just too much going on in anything to really come to a point where you can't tell the original from the copy if you have access to both.
Maybe for something created pre-computer era, but for everything created post-computer era, (say anything originated in the last 20 years and through to the future), there is probably nothing "original" about most collectible works.
For example, a book was probably wrote originally on a word processor which it was digitally transferred to an offset printer an mechanically bound into a book and is now simultaneous available in e-book form and books on tape. What exactly about a non-scarce reproduction is fake in this scenario? Have we created all the rare collectible artifacts that will ever be created? Some food for thought...
I thought humans need to be in the loop at all times, so AIs can select, but humans need to pull the trigger. "Selected target image displayed above. [cancel] [OK]"
I see what you did there, so my choices are to "cancel" the targets, or "ok" to pull the trigger?
Slashdot Mirror
The whole anaolgy fails miserably. The "builder" is a small bussiness, the coder is an employee. The builder's employee who fucked up the wall does not pay for it out of his own money/time, for the same reason his wages don't double when company profit does. An employee is not a one man company, nor should it be, any employer who tells you otherwise is trying to screw you.
Then again there are those folks that insist on being treated as "contractors" instead of employees so they can set their own hours, moonlight for multiple companies, and deduct expenses. Perhaps those one-man/woman companies can deduct the cost of fixing their bugs on their own time?
Any person using the female pronoun by default is simply trying to push some kind of agenda.
I think this might be the person you are referring to and her blog where she links the agenda...
In case you are interested...
There doesn't appear to be any reasonable way to evaluate a students education. My philosophy is simply this: It's up to the student to get everything they want from their education (knowledge, grades, contacts, study habits, practice w/ sleep deprivation, friends). An education is not given and graded, it is taken and exploited....
In reality, there is only one basic needs in the professor-student relationship to assign a grade or a student to get a grade.
1. Assigning a cost to enrollment into the course (basically to deter folks that aren't interested/qualified in occupying space).
However, the school and the student have a different relationship that is facilitated by grades.
1. By advertising their grades to potential employers or other schools, students can increase their perceived value to such institutions.
2. By assigning grades to students, schools can manage their reputation relative to other institutions (nominally poor students can be "discounted" or grades can be "inflated" to increase the perceived value of all students).
In a way grades are like currency that can be inflated/controlled by the institution to manage their economy. This might suggest that there is some alternate currency-substitute (analogous to bit-coin) that has the property that it can't be inflated (devalued). Something like knowledge?
Although this might seem attractive to have some decentralized authority broker the evaluation of students based on what knowledge they were able to mine from the education process, it has the downside for the schools, w/o the ability to deflate when needed, this increase the likelihood a "greek-like" liquidity crisis (employers won't accept credentials and new students won't enroll). Needless to say, they would fight this tooth and nail...
The evaluation of students by decentralized authority has similar problems of bitcoin. W/o a centralized authority, there is continuing instability, there is a risk of collusion taking over the evaluation or an alternate measure becoming more popular and upending the scheme.
Since it's hard to see the value of grades as an independent entity, why bother trying so hard to figure it out. Just like money, it is not the end goal in life.
Mercedes has no X.
Like Tesla, X-class.. real soon now...
http://www.carscoops.com/2014/...
Seems like Tesla is attempting to follow Mercedes...
S-class - top of the line expensive (100K)
X-class - baby SUV (to come out real soon now)
E-class - something for people that envy those that own a S-class but don't have enough money
C-class - crap that ruins the company's reputation
I wonder when Tesla will announce the C-class...
Mercedes seem to think there will be success with an A-class below the C-class, we'll see how many people they can get to part with their money for that badge...
Fun Fact: Jesus wasn't born on Christmas day!
How do you know? Because AFAIK, nobody really has any idea when Jesus was born. Best guess based on biblical accounts is between 6BC and 4BC, but they really don't have any idea what time of year it was based on biblical accounts...
The rationale for Dec 25 historically has been a guesstimate of conception around Spring Equinox (estimated at March 25 by early scholars, but now known to be inaccurate) + 9 months. There is also some anecdotal evidence of a birth date in early January (around Jan 6), but most of these account are from long after Jesus' death and may be confused with a baptismal celebratory date...
Likewise Newton's birthdate is often given as Christmas, but that is a Julian calendar date (in Gregorian calendar, he was born on Jan 4th). Although the Julian calendar was in use in 6BC, it wasn't widely used outside of Europe.
Odds are they were probably born on calendar days that were close to each other relative to the Gregorian Calendar, but nobody really knows...
Creationism boils down to "if God created the world, then it would look exactly like it does now, and as evidence for this, we have folklore and the observation that the world looks exactly as we see it".
I suggest we do away with the anthropic principle as well while we are at it (I always hated that one as it always had that same smell).
Apple managed to survive without ever shipping a Mac running Windows...
Yet they did switch to shipping Macs that could run Windows (boot camp, parallels).
In fact it wasn't just that Macs could run windows, the Apple folks that speced the HW for the Macs were always interested in how well the windows benchmarks performed on all the Mac HW they shipped because inevitably someone would use this as a basis to compare the value proposition of the machines and they knew many folks bought Macs because they could still get PC compatibility if necessary for their job/work.
Right now the world is on Apple's side, but when it hasn't they haven't been historically too proud to make their products useful if necessary (e.g., office on Mac, etc)... Of course the Apple fanbois don't tend to see things that way...
Running a hot android app under iOS might actually be a desired thing someday, you never know..
As I understand it, EBR-II was a breeder, but during its breeding lifetime was intially fueled by U-235 fuel rods, and created Plutonium from U-238 fertile material and was later fueled by reprocessed Plutonium from the breeding (and some decommissioned soviet warheads), and did not ever employ the U-233 from fertile Thorium-232 technique.
Still impressive that a cop acutally knows the law...
Knowledge is a strange thing. Although many people tend to associate knowledge it with schooling or intelligence, however, knowledge is really just something simply acquired mostly by relavent experience.
My guess is someone in the department was tasked to develop some sort of FAQ or memo to help train cops doing speed traps. This person figured out all the thing things they wanted to give out tickets for and looked up the relavent law and made it part of the speed-trap training memo/FAQ given out to officers assigned to speed trap duty.
Call it the chinese room, tricks of the trade or standing on the shoulders of giants or whatever... In computer science, they often call similar optimizationsmemoization.
Should we prevent the spread of headlines that end in a question mark?
No! (oh wait, was that a question), Yes? Dammit! now I'm confused ;^)
Not the orignal poster,but IMO...
Thorium salt reactors are still "up-and-coming" techniques. Although there have been a small smattering of experiments over time, the only significant testing of the idea was back in the '60s (the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge Nation Labs). Although most of the technical hurdles appear to be known, I don't think there is doubt that more work needs to be done to make this production worthy. Some of the biggest issues (e.g, metalugical radiation brittling and salt reprocessing efficiency), are hard to do small scale experiments with so the only real course is to build more experimental reactors to help understand this. Experiments like this are really expensive. The FUJI project (one recent attempt considered to be a leading effort) failed to raise $300M required to build their experimental miniFUJI reactor back in 2011.
There are also secondary effects that are unknown. Uranium mining of past decades created some pretty bad ecological damage and it is unclear that Thorium minining would be any better (or be similarly econonmical with lower impact mining techniques). There is also the issue with decommissioning (even with existing Light-water reactors, this is an ongoing cost concern). At Thorium Salt Reactor have greater fuel efficiency...
One of the continuous knocks against Thorium Salt Reactors has also been nuclear proliferation security issues with reprocessing (since the most efficient configuration for Thorium Salt Reactors is a breeder configuration), but although there are some known safeguards available for denaturing to make bomb-capable material difficult to extract, terrorist level dirty-bomb material is always available in large quantities (a different threat model than in the 60's)...
So, what am I missing? Does India have lots of factories making photovoltaic cells or something?
Why not Solar Thermal? As I understand it...
1. Lack of local companies that make solar thermal equipment (aka CSP or concentrated solar power).
2. Lack of experience with large deployment unlike PV like 50:1 in MW to date (no experience means no reference projects to predict ROI for contracting companies or investment banks)
3. Lack of water resources for cooling (most simple solar thermal needs reliable-access to cooling water to avoid equipment malfunction).
Of course India could deploy a minimal water solar thermal solution (e.g., air cooled or maybe Heller towers), but they have even less experience with that and most government funded programs require a minimum make-local percentage.
I am not an accountant, but, you can probably get away with (not pay penalties) having zero deductions until just before the end of the year, as long as you have a year's worth of taxes deducted from your last few paychecks (however many it takes).
Is this legal, or even a good plan? I have idea!
You absolutely have no idea.
1. Employers must report withholding at least quarterly (or monthly if they are large reporters). These amounts are subject reviewed by the IRS If the IRS notices you are claiming incorrect deductions they will request your W4 from your employer and will likely send you and your employer a "lock-in" letter that will set your deductions (basically legally require your employer to override your W4) if they feel you aren't paying enough as you go. There are also significant penalties and backup withholding requirements for filing false information on your W4.
2. Quarterly estimated payments must be made in 4 equal amounts to avoid penalties unless you can show that your income was equivalently uneven during the year.
3. Do not attempt to cheat the IRS, you aren't any more clever than the wackos that they have previously caught.
If you feel you need an analogy, this monopole construction technique is more akin to constructing a meta-material (e.g., something with a negative index of refraction). It is a simulation of something that doesn't normally exist in nature, but by carefully controlling the small scale structure, you can get it to have certain properties you want in a limited range of operation.
I was specifically rejecting your analogy of monopoles like holes, because that is analogous to using the absence an electron in an environment to simulate an anti-electron, where there are not positive or negative magnetic charges used in this technique (because magnetic charges likely don't exist).
One technique is trying to make a spirit level by filling a tube almost to the top with water and using the bubble as "hole" (the lack of liquid) to exhibit the effect of gravity. Another technique is simulating a level by using the gyroscopes in your cell phone. If there is no liquid available, you cannot execute the first plan, but of course you can still simulate it using other phenomena. In the case of your cell phone, a Micro-Electro-Mechanical (MEMs) gyroscope is used, no liquid needed.
Although you may like the "electron hole" analogy, it does not correctly illustrate this phenomena.
A "electron hole" is a deficit of negative charge in some region relative to another that can be sometimes treated quantum mechanically as if it was a positive charge. This phenomena has nothing to do with this as there are no regions of opposite magnetic charge to borrow from.
This effect described relies on manipulating the magnetic fields in such a way that it organizes a condensed matter state in a way similar to a Dirac-monopole (basically a monopole-like structure, except it has a 1D dirac-string hanging off connected to something that has the net opposite "charge" as opposed to a fundamental monopole which if it existed would be a particle with an actual unit of magnetic charge like an electron has a unit of electrical charge). The interesting thing is that it is a simulation of a dirac monopole in a quantum regime such that it follows the same quantum law of physics as a Dirac monopole.
Of course they couldn't do this in free space (which is how a real dirac monopole could be manifested), but in the context of this experimental environment, it bears the question that if you manipulate the magnetic fields such that it looks like monopole, is it really a monopole you created? Does the field create the particle, or the particle create the field? That's a question to think about. If it quacks like a duck...
As I understand it, there are 2 potential manifestations for what people call magnetic monopoles...
1. Existence of a unit of magnetic charge analogous to an electrical charge attached to some sort of particle.
2. So-called Dirac monopoles (a "monopole" that is connected by a 1-D dirac-string to another "monopole" of opposite magnetic "charge")
Nobody has seen #1, and from what I can gather, most folks don't expect to find them. #2 turns out to be one theoretical way to get monopoles to be consistent w/ Maxwell's equations w/o the existence of magnetic charges. The main theoretical difference between the two might be thought of as the #1 has divergence is all directions, but #2 has divergence in all directions, but one (where the "string" comes out), but this may be unobservable since the Dirac string is 1D.
This experiment in question appears to be a way to simulate the physics of case #2 inside of a condensed matter system. The point isn't "magnetic" in the common sense of the word, only simulating the physics in the confines of that system. One of the breakthroughs appears to be the fact that they could somehow image the (vortex) pattern of the field rather than indirectly inferring the field from it's properties.
I'm sure Kalishnikov made a lot more money selling his rifles than Dr. Neff did from his efforts.
From the NYTimes article...
The general often claimed that he never realized any profit from his work. But in his last years he urged interviewers not to portray him as poor, noting that he had a sizable apartment, a good car and a comfortable dacha on a lake near the factory where he had worked for decades.
Work and loyalty to country, he often suggested, were their own rewards. “I am told sometimes, ‘If you had lived in the West you would have been a multimillionaire long ago,’ ” he said. “There are other values.”
Anyway, if there are any other people who have contributed so much but been recognized so little, I'd love to know about them.
FWIW, there are plenty of practically unknown contributors to the world. Here are a few...
Frank Willis (the security guard that first called the police in some office complex called somekindofliquid-GATE)
Thomas Midgley, Jr (first invented Tetra-Ethyl-Lead and later Freon, probably the man with the most impact on the environment)
Vasili Arkhipov (commander of the K-19 sub AND later the officer that decided to NOT start WWIII during the Cuban missile crisis)
And all the women who had their contributions minimized back in the day when it wasn't proper to recognize their contributions.
Originally, most phosphate production came from guano (basically petrified seabird poop). It was so strategically valuable, that the USA was allowing people to annex islands and exercise mining rights with US military backing. The country of Nauru (aka Pleasant Island) once based their entire economy on it.
Of course, as with most things, we literally ate it all up (it's used to make fertilizer for plants) and now we rely on other sources. Then of course there are people that argue we have reached peak phosphorus production of all possible sources...
What resource shall we queue up next in our sky-is-falling headline of-the-week?
Frankly, plastics don't have the valuable electrical properties that we need for truly innovative design.
I think you need to think outside the box a bit. It doesn't have to be metal (although metal has some useful properties other than electrical)... Some plastics can be conductive, and certain conductive materials can be embedded into plastics and integrated into the 3d printing process...
Here's an example of using electro-conductive carbon black in the 3d printing process...
By analogy, it's the same as me petitioning the court to rule that I never stole anything from you. The court agrees, saying that unless you figure out the puzzle and guess what I stole and when, I'll be deemed innocent and you can't come after me later when you realize that your gold watch is missing.
No. By analogy, it's the same as you agreeing to pay someone $50/per person to stay in a hotel room and paying them $200 for the 4 people in your party. Then a 7 more friends later crash your party. The owner of the hotel now wants $350 more dollar from you based on the original agreement of $50/person and you sue the owner asking for a declatory judgment that you only owe the $200 you already paid because the hotel accepted the original payment and it's up to the owner to prove that those 7 extra people actually stayed in the hotel room.
Sure the owner of the hotel should have come up with a better agreement that addressed a better accounting method to make sure that people that come later to a party were accounted for (e.g., station someone at the door and count people going in and out) and how they would be charged and who should have to pay for that accounting method, but this really has less with patents, but more with the vagaries of contract law when the agreed contract language does not explicitly cover damages and allocation of overhead.
How times have changed...
When I went to university many moons ago, I studied Analog VLSI and power electronics. Upon graduation, I discovered that for most companies, they wanted someone to essentially apprentice for about 6 years before they would let you touch a circuit (they had senior engineers to do the "real" work). Taking a job on the computer engineering side of the fence was ticket to being able to do real work (and paid better too boot) and I was lured over to the "d" side...
Too bad I stopped looking at that stuff back in the D-class amplifier days. Now they have all sorts of fun G and H-class power amplifiers to design. Sigh ;^)
I always wondered why people ordered McRibs.
It certainly can't be consistently ranked better than anything else on McD's normal menu, yet people seem to irrationally still buy them.
Maybe this explains it... Nah... ;^P
You might not be able to tell if something IS a fake if it is of something that was mass produced (like a limited print of a famous work), but there is just too much going on in anything to really come to a point where you can't tell the original from the copy if you have access to both.
Maybe for something created pre-computer era, but for everything created post-computer era, (say anything originated in the last 20 years and through to the future), there is probably nothing "original" about most collectible works.
For example, a book was probably wrote originally on a word processor which it was digitally transferred to an offset printer an mechanically bound into a book and is now simultaneous available in e-book form and books on tape. What exactly about a non-scarce reproduction is fake in this scenario? Have we created all the rare collectible artifacts that will ever be created? Some food for thought...
I thought humans need to be in the loop at all times, so AIs can select, but humans need to pull the trigger. "Selected target image displayed above. [cancel] [OK]"
I see what you did there, so my choices are to "cancel" the targets, or "ok" to pull the trigger?